When she pushes open the front door she’s surprised to be met with silence. It’s Friday morning. Raf’s at work but she expected Bobby to be here with Amanda. Erin glances at the station clock on the back wall. Quarter past ten. There are no groups on now and the buggy is by the door. But he’s safe with Amanda, she thinks, and thankfully not her responsibility yet.
She hangs her coat up, shoves her holdall behind the door, goes to the kitchen sink and runs the tap. When it’s as cold as it’ll go she dips her head down and drinks. She glances out the window at the studio in their garden. The lights are off.
She imagines Amanda babywearing Bobby along the beach to Chalk Mantle or another stack on the coast near them that Erin, to her shame, still hasn’t been to. Amanda spends a lot of her time walking when she’s with Bobby. Then it hits her, maybe Raf’s with them now. She sees him in the maroon beanie hat he lives in in the winter months, Amanda by his side, flaming hair blowing in the wind, swapping war stories from their schooldays while Erin drinks out of the tap like a dog.
She shudders. She’s always had the most horrific paranoia after boozing. In her late twenties, almost overnight, she seemed to become that person, the one that would take it further than everyone else on nights out. It was like all her university friends got together and had a meeting somewhere, complete with flip chart and thought-through agenda, to decide that their partying would become collectively more conservative and forgot to send Erin the memo.
Since she woke up, ‘Raf and Amanda, together’ has been the subject title of a thesis that’s being badly written in her head. Although she managed to suppress the thought in order to focus on last night, she can see now that it fuelled her speech with anger, because now it hurts to think of them walking together. Erin and Raf haven’t taken Bobby for a walk together on a weekday since his two-week paternity leave ended. He’s always said how much he wanted to hang out with them but he’s always had too much on. She’d love to walk arm in arm with her fiancé along the seafront as their son sleeps in the buggy but it hasn’t been possible. But now, for Amanda, it is.
Erin sinks down into the ancient fabric sofa she inherited from her mum and feels it work its charms on her hangover which, now she’s a hundred per cent sober, is throbbing inside her like a pulse. She pulls a blanket off the arm of the sofa, but when it’s in her hand she sees that it’s not a blanket at all but one of Raf’s jumpers. Navy blue, cashmere, incredibly soft to the touch. She pulls it over herself anyway.
The dishwasher beeps to finish its cycle. Erin hadn’t noticed its swishing hum when she came in. In the renewed silence she hears a moan.
There’s no other word to describe it. The sound of a single, open-mouthed moan. From a woman. Erin hauls herself out of the depths of the sofa and perches on the edge, listening. The same sound again. A quiet moan stifled somehow, as if she were trying not to be heard.
The sound comes from down the hall. Erin stands up, balling the jumper in her fingers. The moan again, it seems louder although the tone is almost identical. She tenses her jaw, cursing herself for having such a strong coffee on the train. She goes towards the sound. When she reaches the end of the corridor she sees a yellow piece of clothing on the lilac carpet, a cardigan maybe, just outside Bobby’s room. Amanda’s.
The sound once again. It’s coming from Bobby’s room. As Erin takes tentative steps, she hears words as well. The same voice. A whisper almost, coming from her baby’s room. A wave of sickness sweeps up from her stomach, spit gushes into the back of her throat. She twists the jumper between her fists, stretching it out like a garrotte. Then she looks down at it, Raf’s jumper. Amanda’s cardigan is on the floor outside the room.
She takes a sidestep that puts her in line with the gap in Bobby’s door and looks in. The room’s gloomy, blackout blinds down, nightlight on. The underlying hiss of static. The sound she’s hearing isn’t live. The words come from a recording, they could be Indian or Latin, punctuated by the release of a high sigh, the sound she’d interpreted as a moan. It’s the same passage of words, then the sound, repeated on a loop. A chant.
As she opens the door and steps in she sees a phone on the bedside table that the chant’s playing on. There’s a shape in the single bed, the bed Raf sleeps on when he’s in with Bobby overnight. Erin tiptoes over, breath held. She stands over the bed and there’s Bobby, fast asleep, his features so delicate in repose they could almost be porcelain, lying on his side nestled into Amanda’s chest. Amanda’s sleeping too. Erin watches her breath move Bobby’s wedge of thick hair once, twice, three times.
Amanda’s covered by the duvet but Erin can see she’s not wearing a top or a bra. Her hair cascades down arms that enwrap Bobby, holding him into her. The contrast between Amanda’s pale skin, her freckled shoulders and Bobby’s dark mop of hair, his olivey rolls of flesh, makes the scene look like an image from an Athena poster.
Erin blinks hard, as if there were something stuck in her eye. She feels like she’s intruded on some sacred scene of motherhood, except that’s not Amanda’s baby. The chant continues. Is this how she’s been getting him to sleep so easily? Whenever Erin’s asked, Amanda’s said that he’s not always gone straight off but it’s never seemed to be the twenty-minute screamathon Erin has cope with. This is how she’s being doing it? Chanting MP3s and topless cuddling. She imagines Amanda, this woman who seemed to come along like Mary Poppins, bringing peace to a tempestuous home, someone she thought was becoming her friend, whispering the words of the chant into her baby boy’s ears until he falls asleep, filled with calm, filled with Amanda’s overpowering contentment and something proprietary begins to churn inside her, a heat that expands in her until she thinks her ribcage might pop like a balloon.
Erin steps back, feeling that if she keeps holding her breath, keeps trying to stay still, her legs may crumple beneath her. She loses her balance and knocks into the nightlight, sending it back into the cot behind her with a clatter. One of Amanda’s eyes bursts open. She looks over Bobby’s head, straight at Erin. Her face is blank, no guilt, no concession at being caught in bed nuzzling someone else’s baby. If anything, she looks irritated. The back of Bobby’s head begins to wheedle round and then Erin hears her little boy gearing up to scream but Amanda holds him closer, whispers something into his ears and seems to abate his fury at being woken up. Amanda smiles at her with the side of her mouth that’s visible and raises an eyebrow that seems to be saying to Erin ‘thank God I’m here to save you from yourself’.
20
Erin looks over at the collection of about twenty desks in the middle of a vast poured concrete floor. The Lookout, the co-working space where Raf rents a desk, is in a converted nightclub that’s been stripped back to the brick. Although its members have done their best to conceal it by hanging prints and filling it with house plants, it still has a hint of the building site about it and has barely changed since the only other time she’s popped in to see Raf here six months ago. She’s wanted to come here more, to break up her day with Bobby, but she didn’t get the sense from Raf that a young baby would be particularly popular with the seemingly industrious freelancers.
She looks to the back of the room where there are studio spaces and sees hirsute men in hats, the artists, milling about and laughing at each other’s jokes. Raf’s in the main body of the first floor. He shares the space with a mixture of graphic designers, writers, Amina, who owns an online kids’ clothes shop and who Erin’s become friendly with, and even a landscape gardener. But Raf’s face isn’t squeezed in behind the double monitor where she remembers him being.
There’s some movement at the back of the room and there he is, emerging from where the toilet must be because he’s wiping his hands on a dishcloth. His eyebrows narrow in surprise at seeing her and she locks him with a challenging glare as he swerves through the workspaces towards her.
She’d had to get out of the house and felt she needed to go to Raf but hadn’t really thought why. After Bobby woke, she went and fed him in the living roo
m as Amanda got dressed. Amanda offered to make her a cup of tea but Erin suggested she go and do her own thing after looking after the baby last night and all morning. Erin didn’t reveal how unsettling she’d found it but as she walked into town towards Raf’s workspace, she was shaking.
‘Wasn’t expecting you back till after lunch.’ He leans in to give her a kiss on the cheek. ‘Bloody hell, boozy one, was it?’ He backs away quickly, wafting his nose. ‘Good night though?’ He’s nonchalant as he leads her by the elbow towards the wide window out to the sea that’s given the space its name. He goes to unclip the sling and get Bobby out but Erin bats his hand away.
‘When’s she going?’
‘What?’
‘Amanda – do you know how long she’s staying?’
‘Is everything OK?
‘Just thought you might have talked about it on one of your walks.’ Raf sucks his lips in so his mouth is a line.
‘You want to go downstairs and get a coffee?’ he asks, looking over his shoulder at his co-workers, most of whom are still plugged into their headphones, fixed on their screens.
‘I thought you were “the busiest you’ve ever been”?’ Bobby slightly undermines her airquotes gesture by grabbing at her fingers. A few of the freelancers look up from their computer screens. She gets Bobby to do a little wave to Amina. ‘They’ve got baby toys in the place downstairs?’ she mumbles to Raf. He nods, before throwing a chivalrous arm out, after you, putting his hand on her lower back and leading her and Bobby out the door.
Raf collapses into the cracked leather sofa opposite her. Bobby is at the end of the coffee table between them, manhandling metal cars against the table, making Erin flinch with every clatter. Raf reaches forward for his macchiato and sips it.
‘You’re pissed off because I didn’t tell you?’
‘Every day since you’ve gone back to work I’ve wanted to text you, wanted to call you, wanted you to come home and be with me, to be with us, because it’s boring and lonely and awful, mostly, looking after a baby. But I didn’t, because you have to work, I know you have to work so I didn’t. But to find out from fucking Lorna Morgan that you’ve been swanning around with Amanda. That is why I’m pissed off.’ Raf looks around, self-conscious, and catches the eye of someone he knows who’s sitting in the corner with a MacBook and an overlarge glass teapot filled with mint leaves. He cheerses his little cup into the air. The cafe is painted white but sells houseplants and hand-painted pots, so has the feeling of a very chic greenhouse. He turns back to her and sighs.
‘I didn’t want you to feel guilty.’
‘Me feel guilty?’
‘About me having to take time out to check our baby’s safe.’ Erin swallows. ‘We don’t really know Amanda, and you left Bobby with her, without asking me, then it just became an arrangement. We never discussed it and, I don’t know, I don’t think we should be leaving our only kid with a stranger.’ Raf runs his fingers through Bobby’s mop of hair. The baby looks round at him, one eye a bit lazy, before going back to his cars. Erin goes into her bag and gets out some lip salve and puts it on. She wants to be angry with him. After the shock of thinking that they might be doing something, together, in flagrante in Bobby’s room, she planned to interrogate him further about their relationship. But what he’s saying makes sense. And, is he right?
‘She’s not a stranger,’ she says.
‘I’ve not seen her for twenty years. I’m not sure we should just trust her to look after our not even one-year-old. Maybe I’m more risk-averse than you.’ He says it with a smile. She came into this cafe puffed up with righteous indignation but now she feels like a burst lilo.
‘If you didn’t want her looking after Bobby, why didn’t you say anything?’ Raf leans forward and runs a hand over the back of his head. Shreds of silver in his dark hair catch the light from an old-school film lamp.
‘Honestly?’ Erin shakes her head, Of course honestly. ‘I thought you’d say I was being “obstructive”.’ His turn to do air quotes but he does it only with his tone. ‘Back when you were still trying to act, every time I suggested you study something else or get a job or whatever, you told me I was being obstructive. And the couple of times recently, I’ve said that I thought your social media stuff is getting a bit much, like the other weekend when Bobby’s rifling through the cleaning cupboard, manhandling bottles of bleach while you’re staring at your phone, and I innocently pointed out that we might need to watch him a bit closer now he can move around more, you told me I was being obstructive. It’s been your word of the week for every week for as long as I can remember. So yeh, I didn’t feel like I could “obstruct” you from getting Amanda to watch our son.’
Erin can’t handle this. She gulps at her can of ginger beer, hoping its fieriness will somehow spike her into some sort of response. He’s been lying to her, at least not telling her, that he’s been skipping work to go and spend time with his family friend and yet she’s the one who’s somehow on the end of a character assassination.
‘Sorry –’ she bites the side of her lip – ‘what has this got to do with me being on my phone?’ Her hand thrusts forward, stiff, aggressive and she has to wrap it into a fist and bring it back into her lap.
‘I wanted to be around, for the first few times. I went out with them once or twice but mostly I’ve been upstairs in the bedroom working, just to be on hand. You don’t find Bobby easy, it didn’t feel responsible just handing him off to Amanda and expecting her to get on with it.’
‘So now I’m irresponsible.’
‘And this is why I didn’t tell you.’ He speaks through a laugh. She notices the snagged indent on his canine tooth, a result of too much fingernail biting, he told her once. His other teeth are pristine, shining white against the black of his beard. ‘It’s not a judgement on you. You want to do this stuff –’ he points to her phone on the coffee table – ‘I don’t fully understand it but –’
‘It’s a job. We can make money from it.’
‘Because that’s your motivation.’ Sarcasm courses through his words. Bobby grizzles so Raf lifts him up and stands him on his thighs, facing Erin. The boy jiggles his head in her direction. She widens her eyes and pastes on a smile to try to cheer him up.
‘I was thinking of you, not saying anything. Thought you’d be appalled I was having to catch up on work in the evenings. What with money as it is.’
Erin grabs a napkin off the table and blows her nose into it. She smoked last night and it’s bunged her up, made the hangover feel about twelve times worse. She hadn’t really thought about the implications of Amanda looking after Bobby. When Grace called about the podcast the only thing going through her mind was a strategy to get to the recording studio without her screaming baby. After that, it just seemed fine. Amanda’s always delighted to look after Bobby, shooing Erin off, saying ‘get going now, don’t miss your train’, whenever she’s lingered with them before going up to one of her meetings. And Raf hadn’t said anything. As far as she was concerned, he was OK with it. But now he’s said it, she knows he’s right. Erin doesn’t know this woman and she couldn’t have been more delighted to leave her baby with her.
‘Has it been nice?’ she asks, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice.
‘What?’ Bobby tries to make a goalkeeper’s dive off the sofa so Raf spins him around and jigs him up and down in a galloping motion.
‘Spending time with Amanda?’
‘I wasn’t doing this to spend time with her.’
‘I know, but has it been nice? She’s here to visit you. You thought it might be weird. Is it weird?’ Raf moves his head in a figure-of-eight motion, Bobby still bouncing on his legs. Erin takes a bite of her shortbread.
‘It’s been all right. Good to catch up.’
‘Reliving the glory years?’ she says, spitting a crumb into the air in front of them.
‘I left everything –’ he seems uncomfortable – ‘left Australia completely behind after what Dad did. So yeh, I
guess it’s nice to hear bits and bobs about how things are now.’ He puts his aquiline nose in Bobby’s face who squirms away from it as if it were a small animal. ‘Mainly been good to spend a bit more time with this little legend, hasn’t it, mate?’
‘She’s great with him, isn’t she?’ Erin can feel the acid seeping up through her words. After seeing her baby with Amanda, snuggled up with her, she feels the need to hurt herself more, to curdle her hangover with a double shot of self-loathing.
‘It was a late one last night. Finished up late, didn’t it?’ His voice is firmer, his smile gone, and she feels like she’s talking to a teacher.
‘Quite late, yeh.’
‘Drank a lot?’
‘The speech went really well, like really well. Thanks for asking.’ Urgh, she thinks, she sounds like a stroppy teenager. He sighs, an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Perhaps she doesn’t have a right to be angry with him for taking time out to be with Amanda and Bobby. She entrusted their baby to someone because she was an old friend of his. That’s not enough, that’s not enough for a conscientious parent, for anyone. But, with all of Grace’s plans for her swirling in her head, half of which Raf knows nothing about, it felt like she’d dropped into their lives like manna from heaven. And the fact that Amanda was holding her child close, there’s nothing wrong with that. A nursery nurse would do the same, Erin thinks. But the image of Bobby squeezed against Amanda’s naked chest swims back into her head. Raf catches her eye, the side of his mouth smiles. What would he think if she told him about how she found Amanda and their baby in his bedroom? Would he double down on his needing to be around? Would he suggest that she ease off her trips to London? Erin’s got to go at least twice next week to try and firm up some brand partnerships. She can’t pull away now, just when she’s on the verge of getting paid, money she’s earned, going into her account for the first time in forever.
‘But, you know what,’ he says, ‘I was being overcautious. You were right not to be worried, she’s amazing with him.’ He would be fine with the napping, Erin thinks. He’d love it in fact. She’s always got the sense he wanted her to be more motherly. ‘Skin-to-skin’ contact was something the antenatal classes had always banged on about being a way of getting an angry baby calm. Raf would probably think that Amanda had found that the solution to their problem baby is to simply act like his mother.
The Family Friend Page 9
